This time she asks about websites: big website or small website? How does it “look”?

My point in posting this is because I’m NAUSEOUS. Nauseated by all the link-pimps, wanna be SEO’s charging a mint to get your Google Maps on the front page of Google, etc., because the small business owner was just ignorant…

You get the drift. This is a shady, shoddy, lemme-put-my-hand-in-your-wallet-while-stepping-on-your-foot crappy business at times.

And, sorry – Homey don’t play dat.

I’m hoping the remainder of this interview is helpful to somebody. I’ll eventually edit it, re-write it, and beef it up to make a genuine newbie orientation, which I owed a friend’s dad (THAT is an interesting, other set of posts…)

Oh! Wanted to mention that I put a couple of new pages – well, one really – “Share Me” up top. Just some instructions on this new theme, and hopefully will make it easier to share the love (if you got none to share, that’s cool too, just tell me what a turd you think I am and I’ll likely post it).

Reading the commentary of part one of Make Money Online And Don’t Spend A Dime – Newbie Orientation, some of you had a very similar response to Janet.

Whew! This must have taken you ages to type out. I sure hope you simply did a copy and paste…

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. After days and days (long days and days!) of finding email addresses and sending out emails to those I think might need editing … I decided there really has to be a better way to get clients. To get something. To get off unemployment. To make my son proud of his mama again. Then I spotted your post.

Tomorrow is laundry day. That means heading to the cellar every hour for six or seven hours, folding clothes in between, cleaning what my back allows, and now, reading up on IM! =)

Thank you!

A new morning of internet marketing has dawned here.

Last night I experienced a real brainstorm; ideas for sites swirled so fast and so furiously, I finally got up and found a small notebook to write them all in.

Have I understood this game correctly?

You pick a few areas or products to write about, then build a few websites per area, linking as many as you logically can? Or is it one main website focused on a particular area or product range and loads of lesser websites that link back to it?

~Janet

Great! That’s the bug. You caught it. I’d say if you check out Dave’s blog – I just had a comment on my homepage for it, he’s the guy who wrote the 13k word post on Amazon for free?

There are a few ways to go about it. I have made all my money – apart from Elance – with what are called “micro niche” sites, these focus like laser beams on a few keywords that are related.

So, it might be “Best Wonder Widget.” It gets “3k searches a month” let’s say – then I check the competition, think I can rank for it, then find other words to use using Google AdWords Keyword tool (this is just my process, a lot of others use similar processes).

(I also LOVE a particular SEO set of 4 free tools, and wish I had them much sooner. Talk to me if you download SEO PowerSuiteI can walk you through how I use them for finding keywords, backlinking campaigns…invaluable.)

So I find the keywords and related terms first, and to be honest, I have only up till now built mini-sites. My blog is an exception, but mostly for fun anyway.

When you ask,

[Do] you pick a few areas or products to write about, then build a few websites per area, linking as many as you logically can? Or is it one main website focused on a particular area or product range and loads of lesser websites that link back to it?

Yes.

And: Depends.

It’s up to you – Dave has the HubPages approach, and does WordPress sites that are, I think, more micro-niche…and the ladies at Affiliate Blog Online or Lisa Parmley at have more the “authority site” approach – one big name site with many little categories or “verticals” underneath them.

By the way, Lisa has a great mind-map that is free – lots of good free content there – and she’s an SEO wiz…the ladies at the affiliate blog online are just plain good marketers who just make a killing at Amazon…

Most of the bloggers I associate with are micro niche type, focused on AdSense – I’m sorta out of that boat, and moving towards the affiliate and Amazon approach.

The small micro-sites approach is a pain in that they are usually monetized with AdSense, it takes more sites to make a living that way. It also makes your income vulnerable to the monolithic Google…

Anyhow, I’m after bigger fish and like the product-oriented, write a review and get sales approach…So it really depends on your own goals and strengths.

Me? I like sales, and promoting products I believe are helpful to people. I can close a sale – why wouldn’t I go with the affiliate plan? But as to size of site, and quantity: I’d say keep your options open.

The danger with a mega site is that Google can just stop sending you traffic – recently happened to Blogcatalog, and they lost MILLIONS. Big site = big target. Easy to lose…

For me, I’ll always have a mix. Big/small. Micro sites, authority sites…if Google shuts down big mama site (I don’t have one yet that is profitable per se), it’s OK: I have “X” number of other sites, with more than just AdSense.

There’s people making a ton of money with one pagers…it all depends on what you’re promoting, and how, and what your personal goals are.

Start here:

1) Define what you want to write about – or what you think is most profitable. Maybe you hate the topic, but you can still churn it out – go for it if you can hang in there (I write best when I care…).

2) Define your business goals.

3) Do your keyword research.

If you have that research done, sometimes the site builds itself.

My approach is changing and I don’t have an either/or proposition – both methods work. I’m not “the” guy to answer about authority sites, for that I’d go see Lisa Parmley or Leo Dimilo.

You see the categories take shape, etc. once you do your keyword research (and especially when you use the Wonder Wheel…).

Also: Dave picks high-compete Keywords, I go for the low-compete, but he makes a ton more money than I do. I’m going to be trying his approach on some pages, then build backlinks to them, see how it goes.

To be honest with you, he has more cash to toss at his business, too – so I’ll be a micro-nicher for a while yet!

Once you have your keywords, your sites up and good content written that’s been properly SEO’d (again I like to use some of the tools with SEO PowerSuite, especially WebSite Auditor to check on-page SEO, though I also have SEOPressor plugin, but it costs $97…it helps speed things up for me, but WebSite Auditor would have been sufficient).

Next step you’ll need to do is get backlinks to increase your website’s position in the search engine results page or “SERP.”

2 Comments

This is a great post…it is a basic structure if you stay with it eventually you will be making money. I stopped buying a lot of the big hyped products a long time ago. They will tell you just what is said above…only you can pay them several thousand, and be in their community…

I seem to have ADD and just get all focused in and then think of something new. I think that is the category most people involved in marketing are.